The worst March

Some people love July. Height of summer, no school. Great month.

Some people love December, for similar reasons in Australia, though school runs until about the 20th. Then, you know, Christmas.

Some people love October because of Halloween and because the leaves turn.

Me, I've always been partial to March. It's not because of the arrival of spring, directly, though the warming of the weather in the U.S. was always pleasant. No, it's because it represented a confluence of the things I loved, all within a four-week span.

Since this is a movie blog, I'll start with the movies. From when I was young, March was always the month of the Academy Awards. And it used to be in late March, almost April. It was the crowning moment for the previous movie year, when you got to finally find out what was the best of the best.

Then about 25 years ago, two other things came along to surpass the Oscars, especially once the Oscars moved to February. For a couple sweet years there, though, they were all in the same month.

In 1993, I started playing fantasy baseball, and that love has come to define my love for baseball, especially now that the Red Sox have long since exorcised their curse and won four World Series. Each year in March, I would begin feverishly planning my strategy for drafting that year's team, a glorious day that usually would arrive sometime after the 20th of the month.

Then the very next year, 1994, I started following March Madness. Another obsession was born, though this one was limited to the three-week period in March and early April when the tournament was actually happening, as I never became a season-long college basketball fan. But that tournament ... well it was just about the best and most fun thing going, especially if you had five or ten bucks riding on it.

This year ... none of those things happened.

Oh, I got my Oscars, when my favorite movie of last year was crowned best picture. That was pretty cool.

But by the time the calendar flipped over to March, that was a distant memory, replaced by all coronavirus, all the time.

March Madness, on the other hand, was cancelled. And my fantasy baseball draft has been postponed indefinitely, vaguely planned now for the weekend before the start of the season. But no one knows when that might be. If it will be.

Of course, the loss of small pleasures such as a month of back-to-back awesome things pales in comparison to the deaths of what may end up being millions of people. But you know I know that without me having to say it. Today, I just want to mourn March for a minute.

In the good old days in the mid-1990s, I used to spend the month with a fantasy baseball magazine and a printed out March Madness bracket under my arm, catching exciting finishes of basketball games as I basked in a new spring warmth and talked with friends. And I was no casual participant in these activities. I ran March Madness pools and I commissioned fantasy baseball leagues. I was in neck deep in preparations and statistics and a general sense of joy.

I think specifically to the spring of 1995, my final in college -- and think, sadly, how lucky I was compared to this year's college seniors, who will end their college careers with remote learning and having drinks with friends over Zoom.

But anyway, that year two friends and I spent our two-week spring break in Florida to stay at one's parents' vacation house. It was Sanibel Island on the west coast of Florida, not one of the typical spring break hot spots you see in Spring Breakers. But there was another group of women from our school staying in the same neighborhood, who we got together with on a couple occasions (though not together with, unfortunately).

As much as I love and remember that experience for what it was -- beach, friends, drinking, the possibility of romance -- the things I really remember were waiting excitedly for Thursday through Sunday to roll around, so I could watch a new round of college basketball, as I was doing pretty well in the pool I was running, and researching which pitchers and hitters I wanted to draft later on that month. And then going over to watch the Oscars at the place where those girls were staying. It was David Letterman's lone year hosting. You know, the whole "Uma-Oprah" shtick. Forrest Gump won best picture.

That was exactly 25 years ago. It was my quintessential March. I've had many good ones since, but that was the best.

And this is the worst.

There's no baseball. There's no basketball. We've already celebrated the old movies, and there are no new ones.

And people are dying.

A lot of people.

I've got my fingers crossed for April, but, you know, not for any good reason. April will likely be worse.

But maybe, just maybe, we can flatten the curve, and May will be this year's March.

Counterprogramming

I haven't watched Contagion yet, but I have scratched that itch to terrify yourself indirectly, via other end-of-the-world/breakdown of society programming.

In the last week alone I've watched The Platform (discussed last post), Dr. Strangelove (only my second time seeing it -- I know) and The First Purge (a strong continuation of the series after Election Year, a personal favorite). I could and probably should write individual posts about each of those last two, but what can I say, I've fallen behind -- working from home has not actually, so far, afforded me the extra time I thought it would, in part because I've felt more tired at the end of each day, rather than less.

I decided to pivot to something more cheery on Friday night, but the viewing of The First Purge had something to do with it.

In that film, which came out in 2018, Marisa Tomei somewhat surprisingly appears as one of the only real names in the cast. You've got Lauren Velez from Dexter, but everyone else was pretty much new to me. And there were some good ones. I particularly liked the co-lead, Y'lan Noel, whom I could have sworn I'd seen somewhere before. Charisma out the wazoo.

But back to Marisa Tomei.

I marvelled how I didn't think she was ever going to start looking old, or if she did, she'd stay hot, just like Helen Mirren. Tomei is 55, if you can believe it, but in this movie, I wouldn't have had to squint too hard to think she could play 28. Now maybe that's heaps and heaps of cosmetic surgery, but it doesn't look like it. And I'm not going to google to find out.

And so it was that on Friday night, as I was flipping through my library of DVDs because streaming has become shocking from all the extra drain on the bandwidth, I came across the movie where she really was 28. Or, probably 27 when it was filming.

And until I started watching My Cousin Vinny, I didn't realize how much I really needed some counterprogamming.

I basically grinned from ear to ear throughout the nearly two-hour duration of this film, always a favorite, one I watched incessantly in the 1990s when I had it on VHS. But when I saw it in 2011, that was probably my first viewing of the 21st century, and this was my first one since then. Maybe I need to watch My Cousin Vinny more often.

Tomei won an Oscar for this role, of course -- I think of it alongside the one Kevin Kline won for A Fish Called Wanda as two of the times the Oscars have really surprised me by picking a performer only for their comedic ability. (Oh, and that's another movie I should definitely watch again during our home confinement.)

Tomei's performance is a lot more than that. I already had a thing for girls with New York accents from a couple summer crushes I had in the years before the release of this movie, but Tomei sent that affection skyrocketing.

Of course, I belittle her performance if I only talk about how it makes my toes curl. But the way she's charming -- in a bit of a vulgar way -- is just part of a fully realized character that feels considered down to the detail. Any number of the little looks she makes in this film are perfectly calibrated, but I think some of the gestures are even better. In fact, my favorite Tomei-ism is when, at the end of her very successful witness testimony, she extends her arms forward in a little preening gesture, her hands angled downward just at the end. Normally, preening is a sign of excess self-regard, but not here -- it's a physical release of her pent-up need to help her fiancee, which has been simmering unsatisfied the whole movie. And it's totally unconscious, or at least, it's unconscious in a premeditated way that only a really great actor can pull off.

I love that there's still a bit of the ballsy New Yorker in roles Tomei plays even now, most recently, as Aunt Mae in the new Spider-Man movies. She doesn't seem old enough to be anybody's Aunt Mae, but hell, she could almost be Peter's grandmother, given that she's 55 and Tom Holland is only 23. Two 16-year-old pregnancies would be all it would take.

Anyway, I came here to tell you more about the counterprogramming than the Tomei, but a person can get a bit carried away. (I'm a poet and I don't know it.)

But, back to the counterprogramming -- I intend to do more of it. Watching movies about the world ending or society crumbling have not, in the end, increased my stress level, I don't think. They may even help me cope. And I probably will watch Contagion again before all is said and done.

But the counterprogramming is magnifique as well.

Especially when it comes with a bit of hairspray and attitude.

For a critic, the show must go on

I have taken, and continue to take, all the coronavirus changes in stride.

But one I didn't realize until it was quite late in the game was that I wouldn't be able to review new movies anymore.

Not so fast.

There are still new movies coming out, they just aren't coming to your local cineplex. Nothing is coming to your local cineplex, in fact, other than maybe a couple stray tumbleweeds.

But Netflix? That's a different story.

I've only reviewed a select few Netflix movies for ReelGood. It's not that I don't consider Netflix movies legitimate. I didn't once, but I gave that up some time ago.

Rather, it's that I don't usually notice exactly when something is dropping on Netflix, and I maintain the editor's old-school notion of having a "news peg" for a piece of writing. Although standards on this front have relaxed in recent years, I still consider movie reviews to consist of a first look at a hot new item -- or at least a first look in the country where I'm currently located. (Movies sometimes release here a full six months after they release in the U.S.)

But that's going to change. It's going to have to.

Not the reviewing a hot new item part, but the knowing when movies first release on Netflix part.

And so it was that last week I googled that article that'll tell you exactly what's releasing on the streaming service during a particular seven-day period. That's how I found The Platform, the Spanish language sci-fi horror satire whose poster you see above. You can read my review here.

And what a great find, as it turned out. I waited until its Friday night release to watch it, and gobbled that thing up right then and there. It's a cousin of the movies Cube and Circle, so if you liked those movies, here's another geometrically themed movie title for your consideration.

Anything else that came out last week? It's already ancient history. (I didn't really like the other choices, anyway.)

No one says I have to sacrifice my principles as a journalist just because it's coronavirus. Sure, I could go back and review Spenser Confidential or A Fall From Grace or Horse Girl, but those titles are already stale.

And that's okay, because if nothing else, Netflix will keep giving me the new and the fresh.

Films themselves are a bit like a virus, fighting to stay alive despite attempts to extinguish them. They want to be seen. And seen they will be. And reviewed they will be. By me.

No, I won't be able to see Mulan, or Wonder Woman 1984, or probably even Tenet, which is not scheduled to come out until July.

But the next Platform?

I'll be ready, my pen poised over the paper.

Metaphorically speaking, anyway.

I finally saw: Gairkway Parkway

Some things you remember for absolutely no reason at all. This is one of those.

July, 1984. Cali, Colombia. No, this is not the start to some drug epic. It's the story of a ten-year-old boy who travelled by himself to visit a friend who had returned home from living in America. He stayed with him for about two weeks in a beautiful home that had its own swimming pool. And no, his host family was not part of the drug trade.

But the boy and his host family did indeed go out to the drive-in one night, to see the big new American release Breakin'. And for some reason, 36 years later, that boy retains a memory of having seen the trailer for a movie called Gorky Park, about a murder that takes place in frozen Moscow. It was released in December of 1983 in the U.S. and was finally making it to South America six months later.

It couldn't have disturbed me that much -- the most disturbing thing in this movie, the removal of the faces of the snow-buried victims, could not have appeared in the trailer. Could not have.

So why did this trailer, images of which I can still remember, stick with me for 36 years? It couldn't have just been that I remembered the Spanish pronunciation of the title as being Gairkway Parkway, could it? (I think "Gerkway" looks better, but I pronounce the first syllable as rhyming with "air," not "her.")

I won't explore the eccentricities of my ten-year-old brain here today. Instead, I'm here to tell you that I noticed this movie popping up on Stan earlier this week, and I watched it on Thursday night, scratching the itch of the ominous curiosity that formed in my brain 36 years ago and never left.

With all this build-up, I wish I had a more interesting payoff.

This was a fine movie. It didn't disturb me, though it had a good early 80s synth score (by James Horner, who could work in that mode apparently) that set up the possible conditions for that. It's a fairly average murder mystery, I suppose, though the detail of taking place in the former Soviet Union made it a bit more memorable in that regard.

My biggest takeaways:

- I was surprised there were so many actors I knew in this film. Having never even really looked up the film before now, and having not known who these people were back when I saw the trailer, I was surprised to learn that it starred William Hurt, Lee Marvin and Brian Dennehy, and that Ian Bannen (Waking Ned Devine) and none other than the emperor himself, Ian McDiarmid, make small appearances. I guess I figured that since it was a movie set in Russia, and that the trailer I saw was in Spanish, there was something doubly foreign about it. Except no, it's just a Hollywood movie, directed by Michael Apted.

- I was distracted by how handsome William Hurt is. I guess Hurt was probably always considered a heartthrob, but I hadn't remembered thinking of him that way previously. He's sparklingly beautiful in this film.

- The uncovering of the dead bodies with their faces removed was, indeed, pretty disturbing. Maybe that did make it into the trailer? But if so, why isn't that the thing I remember most? Maybe they mentioned it, though I don't believe that trailer had subtitles, though I guess the trailer was probably in English with a Spanish voiceover, though really, I'm just not sure.

One thing that surprised me was how many people seem to know about Gorky Park and have some affection for it, which is strange because I literally didn't think I'd heard a single other mention of it between 1984 and now. The next day I told a friend I'd watched it, and he recalled seeing it in the theater with his parents. As I was watching, my wife walked through the living room and got a little smile on her face, like she was calling to mind some fond memory. When I told her what movie it was, she said "Oh yeah," with that fond smile growing a little more definite.

Who knows, maybe she had her own Colombian drive-in movie experience with it.

Audient Authentic: Turksib

This is the third in my 2020 monthly series watching “classic” (pre-1990) documentaries.

After starting this chronological series with two films in the 1920s – two really good ones at that – I had wanted to move further afield when I delved into the 1930s. It was not to be, in terms of year, format (silent vs. sound) or even geographical location. In fact, although the movie I chose was released in 1930, it is listed as a 1929 movie in some locations – in other words, the exact same year as the movie I watched in February, Man With a Movie Camera.

The problem with the significant documentaries of the 1930s, such as they are, is that very few of them are of feature length. I am rigid in one way when it comes to comparing films, and that is length. I can’t rightly judge a 12-minute film alongside a 100-minute one – they just aren’t both apples.

I had identified a film I thought I wanted to watch, Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains, but balked when I saw it was only 28 minutes long. Over the years, I’ve expanded down my definition of feature length to include something like the 45-minute masterpiece Sherlock Jr., but 28 minutes was just a bridge too far.

So I decided to use my very helpful library-funded streaming service Kanopy to give me some new choices. You can filter by category and by the year of its release, which gave me seven 1930s documentaries to choose from. Only two of them, however, surpassed that magic 45-minute barrier, both examples of early Soviet documentary. The longer of the two, the 58-minute Turksib, became my choice for March.

Director Viktor Turin’s film of the building of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway was indeed not released until May 24^th, 1930, making it a 1930 film by my definition. However, its Wikipedia page starts out by calling it a “1929 film,” which makes sense only in the fact that it was filmed in 1929. In fact, it was released before the railway was opened, and in the end portion, it plays very much like a promotional video for the railway, with a lot of flashing of the year 1930 as the time when this great event will occur. So I can see why a person might think of it as a 1929 film, even though it is not.

What’s more, the film was made in the very same part of the world as Man With a Movie Camera, further making it a less than ideal next pick in a series devoted to the full spectrum of available samples falling under the umbrella “classic documentary.”

I’ll try to do better form here on out.

Anyway, I enjoyed this film. It doesn't tell a whole lot of a story, but it shows a couple different far-flung regions of the greater Russia area and their vastly different climates, from the dry plains to the south to the frigid tundra of the north. We get a bit of a flavor for life in both locations (which also kind of reminded me of my first film of this series, Nanook of the North) and can see the nascent attempt to bridge the two between the titular railway line. We see local groups move from resistant to accepting and even begin to help out the effort. 

What I really liked about Turin's approach was his sense for a part standing for the whole. He had a great sense of how to establish his settings by focusing in on unlikely details, which also come in a succession that shows his great understanding for pacing and editing. He sets his camera up in really interesting locations as well -- sometimes under a train as it is going along the tracks, even. 

I don't know that this is a particularly notable or enduring document, but I found it to be assembled in a very watchable way, including maps that show the terrain to be covered, and a good ethnographic sense of the lives of the locals. And though it does become quite sensational in the end, as it previews the coming attraction about ready to open, that doesn't detract from the smart and even-handed approach to the material that precedes it. 

I feel like I could/should add a bit more, but it's been three nights since I watched it and to be honest, some of the details have already fled my brain. But I did really like it, so, good accidental choice for March.

And then, just for the hell of it, I also watched The Plow That Broke the Plains, as a bonus.

I enjoyed this to some degree, but I feel like it cheats a bit more in its approach to the documentary format. It too is trying to show an important regional change over a period of time, using some sort of similar maps as Turksib to show the swath of the U.S. that it considers to represent the great plains, and how they were tilled over time to become a great wheat-producing region. But in telling this history, it uses footage that was obviously shot only recently to represent, for example, a time of great production and profitability of the regional farming during World War I. Only World War I was actually nearly 20 years before this was shot, so you know it's kind of bullshit.

Still, it does give an interesting, if short, survey of the history of the farming of this region, until it was abandoned in the Great Depression. You do get a sense for a 20-year period, even if it relies on things like newspaper headlines and footage that you know is divorced from time to tell the story. Hamstrung a bit by that decision, the film is light on actual humans appearing on screen.

It also feels a bit too "News on the March"-style with its narrator speaking in that dramatic and exaggerated style known to the news reels of the era. It has the same promotional style of the last segment of Turksib, only made more on-the-nose and cheesy (for want of a better word) due the spoken rather than written word. It felt like something I would have watched in school in the early 1980s, a relic of earlier styles of imparting information to people/children, and who knows, maybe I did.

Okay, I've got some good feature-length candidates in the 1940s, I think. After I get these earlier decades out of the way, I'll slow my pace down and begin watching a couple movies per decade. 

Missing my last Shot at the movies

I was never going to see Bloodshot.

As someone pointed out on a podcast I listen to, it seems like a 1990s action movie. It seems that way just from the poster. I'm sure the trailer, which this guy probably saw but which I haven't, makes the similarity even more manifest.

I was never going to see Bloodshot -- until it looked like the last movie I might be able to see for a long, long time.

When I realized how quickly coronavirus was spreading, and how rapidly the resulting changes to our way of life were coming, I hatched a flimsy plan to get out one of the nights this week to indulge in a soon-to-be luxurious activity -- just sitting there, with a popcorn, watching a dumb piece of entertainment wash over me. And really, I didn't care how dumb, as long as it was happening.

But when I told my wife of my plan, she looked at me sideways. She thought of a movie theater as a breeding ground for indifferent teenagers who don't wash their hands enough and think they're going to live forever, because in this case, they probably will. They won't die of coronavirus, but they could make others die. And she's not wrong.

So I reluctantly passed on the movie I had no interest in seeing.

And now, who knows how long before I'll get my next chance.

The 2020 movie season is already ruined. Oh, I'll do my usual rankings at the end of the year, there's no doubt about that. But if I'm going to get anywhere close to the numbers I've enjoyed in recent years, which have been in the 140s, I'll have to watch pretty much all of the movies Netflix releases. And even then I'm betting I'll have a hard time reaching 100.

Yep, it's going to be a different movie year this year.

I have my hopes about seeing movies that have already been released in the U.S. but not yet here, such as Pixar's Onward. There's no point in holding that one back, one would think, just to try to salvage a couple extra million that might come from Australia. It's supposed to open in 12 days.

But if there aren't even any movie theaters open, there really will be no point.

Australia has not yet figured out where it's going on that front, as we're behind many parts of the world on our timeline. We're still going to work and school, though I've been prepared to work from home, and that could start any day now.

But the movie theaters have already been emailing us to tell us the measures they're taking to promote the twin goals of profit and social distancing, such as considering movies to be sold out once they've reached 50 percent seating capacity. That's all well and good, but given the general state of movies now and the specific state of the world right now, one would think that a theater 10 percent full would be a coup.

Soon, they may just get with the program and shut their doors indefinitely.

Which has already happened in the U.S. Every bit of news about the changes wrought by coronavirus is shocking, but one of the most shocking for me was the announcement that AMC Theaters in the U.S. is planning to close its doors for six to 12 weeks. I mean, that's in keeping with projections for the disruptions to other areas of public life, but when you think about how that cuts into what we had once thought would be a movie season, it brings it all home, especially for cinephiles like you and me.

Even if the theaters improbably stay open here for a while longer, my wife won't want me going, even if I promise her I'll see the late show and only if it's less than five percent sold. (But this ain't America -- the "late show" is about 9:30.)

It would have been nice to have that last sojourn to the theater, or to at least have been aware it was my last sojourn when I made it. As things stand now, that honor goes to Downhill, a not-great but not-terrible remake of Force Majeure that I hope will be able to blame some of its status as a flop on coronavirus.

If I could guarantee every screening would be like that one, I'd be in great shape -- I was the only one in the theater that night.

But since I can't, it looks like I am going to take a theater hiatus, whether the world forces me to or not. If I review new films, they will be Netflix debuts, or possibly films that are debuting on iTunes. I'll keep working. I'll try to, anyway.

And I'll keep posting here, through thick or thin.

The only thing anyone's talking about

I was considering writing a post today about Claire Foy, about how we finished watching her final season of The Crown this week and then the next night I watched her in a very different role in The Girl in the Spider's Web. I may still write that post.

But until I've written this post, the post I'm currently writing, there's no point to go back to engaging anything quite so frivolous.

Coronavirus is the only thing on anyone's mind, everywhere around the world, so I've got to talk about it here, whether the connections to the movies are anything more than flimsy or not.

We're a bit behind here in Australia, which is a good thing in this case -- not that many cases yet (though more announced by the day) and public gatherings larger than 500 people not yet banned (that won't happen until Monday). Because the ban doesn't take effect until Monday, I am apparently going to my New Order concert tonight, which will be weird.

But we're all about to go into lockdown here too. My work has been trying to prepare us to work from home for a couple weeks now. The fact that it hasn't totally worked is not a sign of our ineptitude, don't worry. It's a combination of the massive demand (I work in IT) and the fact that we've got to get this softphone technology working on our laptops, and for some reason, it isn't.

Of course the movies that this feels similar to are many, but I've chosen probably the lamest and most obvious as my art for this post. "Most obvious" for obvious reasons; "lamest" only as a synonym for "most obvious," as I remember being quite shaken by Outbreak when I saw it.

I do sort of look forward to any period of home confinement, as long as it doesn't last too long. We're reasonably well stocked up on food (and toilet paper, thanks to our monthly subscription service to environmentally friendly TP that comes in large boxes in the mail), and it's heaven for a movie guy to be forced to stay home with his Netflix. Plus, as they say here in Australia, "change is as good as a holiday." It'll be different, I'll give it that.

Of course, the sooner it's over, the better, as the movie landscape is already being thrown into disarray this year (the latest Fast & Furious movie being the latest casualty I've noticed), and my precious baseball has just been thrown into an indefinite status.

Plus, you know, the health of all the senior citizens I know, which include my parents and my parent-in-laws.

Then there's the ongoing wonder if I myself have coronavirus. My wife assures me that there's no reasonable way I would have been exposed, nor am I showing the most alarming and telltale symptoms (sore throat and fever). Though I have had 1-2 of the other symptoms for close to two weeks now, which is at least annoying, because it's put me into a constant debate with myself about what my responsibilities are regarding getting tested. For a person with neurotic tendencies, that can be a kind of death spiral.

And on that subject of my possible exposure ... there's actually a path to it, and I can relate it to movies.

In googling new COVID-19 cases reported in Victoria, I came across a story about the people who had been diagnosed. It didn't name their names, but it did chart their movements since they had returned to the country (as all but one of them had recently returned from international travel). This section was quite interesting, as it talked about the actual cafes and supermarkets they visited, and approximately what time they visited. And in one case, one of the guys (I don't actually know if it's a guy or a woman) had gone to see a movie at Cinema Nova last Thursday night. (A movie called The Amber Light, the article even says -- though that must have been a special event screening as that movie is not currently playing at Nova.)

Nova is, of course, the cinema where I see approximately half of the new movies I see in the theater, including most indie releases that don't make it to the more mainstream cinemas. I wasn't there last Thursday night, but I was there this past Tuesday to see Downhill.

I'm not such an idiot that I think some coronavirus molecules were living on a movie theater seat for five days waiting to pounce on me. But it does create the greatest "close to home" threat related to the virus that I personally have experienced, if only symbolically.

So I'm wishing my best to Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, vaguely feeling excited about upcoming movie marathons on Netflix, and more than anything, hoping that a virus with a 3% mortality rate does not mean that 3% of the people I know will die from it.

Stay safe out there everyone.

Divided attentions

I’ve taken on a new initiative and I thought it was time to tell you about it.

The reason it’s been six days since I’ve written a post doesn’t really have anything to do with what I’m about to tell you. It doesn’t have to do with coronavirus, either, you’ll be glad to know. (Though I can see why your mind might have gone there, considering that my last post was about the virus.) Actually, it has mostly do with being out of town for 48 hours over the long Labour Day weekend here in Australia, and then feeling a bit like I’ve been playing catch-up since then.

However, I do suspect that what I’m about to tell you could lead to a reduction in my posting to The Audient. I’ll just have to see how it goes.

So that thing is: My blogging/film posting attentions are now divided between two film websites.

No, I haven’t started a new website. I’ve taken over one that might have died without me.

ReelGood (reelgood.com.au) is where I have been writing reviews for the past five-plus years, starting with my review of Birdman in late 2014. It’s also where I’ve been podcasting for nearly that amount of time, though quite intermittently and sometimes with breaks of as long as six months between episodes.

The thing is, the guy who has been running that site does not have the time to do it anymore. He’s in grad school to become a professor and I can certainly understand why that limits his bandwidth.

Without him putting up posts, the content there would quickly go stagnant. And more importantly, without him paying the (minimal) monthly cost to keep the lights on, they would go dark.

That’s where I come in.

I’m taking the reins from him on running the site. That means not only posting my own reviews, but posting his (I hope), as well as finding new writers and ways to grow the site.

In any case, I expect it to take a lot of time, if I want to do it decently.

Let the site die? No way. This is the site that is currently legitimizing me as a film critic, not to mention allowing me to continue getting my annual critics card that allows me to see movies for free. No way I am consigning it to the dust bin of history. 

Now, most of what I write on The Audient is not appropriate for that site anyway. No one coming to a proper website that isn’t focused around my personality wants to read my arcane lists and rambling posts about viewing coincidences. No one wants to hear funny movie opinions held by my kids or why Tangled is the best movie of the 2010s.

That’s good news. It means there will always be a place in my blogging brain for Audient-specific content, and I have no immediate or long-term plans to stop running this site or merge it with ReelGood.

It does mean, however, that it’s perhaps inevitable that I’ll need to devote some of the energy I devote to The Audient to ReelGood instead. It likely means longer breaks between posts and certainly no streaks of productivity like earlier this year, when I posted for a very biblical 40 straight days.

That said, the quantity of my writing on The Audient has always been a function of what I’m inspired to write based on what happens to me in the course of my day-to-day interactions with film. So working for another site does not rule out a 40-day writing binge either.

Anyway, it’s too early to say how much one site will cannibalize the other. I certainly won’t cross-pollinate, as it’s (at least informally) against internet rules to post the same content on two different websites. But there may be posts I would have previously written for The Audient – say, that most recent post about James Bond getting coronavirus – that I will now feel it better serves me to post there, rather than here.

So stand by … we’ll see how it all goes.

James Bond has coronavirus

Apparently, James Bond doesn't think April is a very good time to die.

November would be much better.

As you've surely heard by now, the release of Daniel Craig's "last" James Bond movie (didn't we hear that two movies ago?) has been postponed due to COVID-19. No Time to Die was supposed to come out in April, but now Cary Fukunaga's film will debut in November instead.

Maybe that would have been a better time anyway -- more consistent with the last few Bond releases -- but the reasons for it make me uncomfortable. It threatens to set a bad precedent and to screw up our whole movie year.

What if every studio thinks it's not going to make enough money on its movie by releasing it during a coronavirus panic? It'll be a pretty shit summer movie season, then. (Even more shit than it already appears to be, I should say.)

I get that financial considerations must be, er, considered when you are talking about a movie that has cost the studio at least $200 million in terms of both budget and advertising. Whether those are the actual figures for No Time to Die or not, they represent a good estimate for movies of that calibre, probably even on the conservative side.

But I kind of feel like earnings are relative, right? A movie studio has a lot of money, so in this day and age, a flop will rarely bankrupt it. The most important function of a flop, in practical terms, seems to be to determine whether this type of a movie is a hit with audiences, worth making again in the future. The actual box office total should be graded on a curve, relative to other movies released at the same time, not held out as some kind of absolute.

Which would work if all the studios just went ahead with their current release schedule.

But that's not going to happen, because UA/Universal/MGM have already balked. They've already messed up the playing field.

Let's talk about No Time to Die in comparison to April's other big action movie, which so far has not been postponed: Black Widow. If both movies came out in April and made $50 million less domestically than we might have expected, we'd still have a good idea of their success related to each other. We'd still be able to write think pieces, for example, on whether we're stuck in our old-world obsessions with male action heroes, or whether we can get behind female action heroes just as easily.

Now, though, the whole equation has been thrown off. If Black Widow flops, we won't know if it's because of coronavirus, or because audiences don't like female action heroes, or just because Cate Shortland is a bad filmmaker (my vote is for the last one).

No Time to Die, though, could be exchanging the devil it knows for the devil it doesn't know. What if we are even more afraid of each others' germs in November than we are now?

I hope studios don't start cancelling the movie season. And it won't just be the tentpole movies that get moved, in theory. Every movie is judged by its own expected success, and a movie that needs to earn $10 million at the U.S. box office to be considered a winner may be just as concerned about recouping its production costs as the latest James Bond -- just as concerned about proving to investors they have invested their money correctly.

I don't know how it's all going to shake out, but I don't like it.

Meanwhile, people in Melbourne are buying up all the available toilet paper. Seriously.

Taking my unbroken remote control for a spin

How’s this for stupid?

For the past three years or so – maybe longer – we have been making do with substitute remote controls for our region-free DVD/BluRay player, made by Pioneer. It’s a treasured device in our home as it can play both the movies we might borrow from the library (or more rarely, rent), as well as those I brought with me to Australia nearly seven years ago.

As good and as treasured as the device is, its remote control was not up to snuff. It crapped out sometime in 2016 or 2017, though that’s just an estimate – it could have been as long ago as 2015. I don’t remember, really.

We resolved this issue at first with an app on our phones that could control the device. This provided me no end of giddiness. Controlling your DVD player through your phone? Crazy world.

But as both devices used the WiFi, and the WiFi did not work out in our garage, it left us without a way to remotely control the player when we wanted to watch a movie there. We sometimes ended up playing movies through my computer hooked up to the TV with an HDMI cable, but that didn’t help with movies from America as my laptop DVD player is not region free.

The WiFi works better in our garage now, but that’s irrelevant because the app no longer works. It won’t identify the device. I have no idea why, even though I’m an IT guy.

But that didn’t matter because when we got our new smart TV last year or the year before, the remote control for that suddenly started controlling the DVD player, without us even doing anything about it. (My wife says she did not set it up, anyway.) That worked great for a while.

And then, as mysteriously as it had come, it was gone. Suddenly the smart TV remote had no effect on the DVD player, and the buttons on the front would only work under certain circumstances, without explanation. If you went straight to the play screen, you could usually get the movie to start, but if you had to choose a language first, you usually could not. It was just drop dead for those movies at that point. And I was starting to wonder if this device might no longer be a viable part of our home entertainment environment.

Don’t worry, I’m getting to the stupid part.

On Saturday we were doing a bit of a clean-up around our kitchen, including long-neglected areas such as the top of the refrigerator. This was where the original remote control the device had been collecting dust and scum and hair over the years.

As it was a total purge of the unnecessary items on top of the fridge, I flashed the remote at my wife and asked her if it was worth storing in our box of other broken audio-visual odds and ends, like cables that no longer do anything and adapters that no longer adapt. I thought it was, just because I’m a hoarder.

She thought it wasn’t, but she also suggested something revolutionary: “Did you check to see if it still works?”

Well of course it didn’t work, I said – you don’t stick a working remote control on top of the refrigerator to collect dust and scum and hair for three years. But the mere suggestion that it might work put a little glimmer in my eyes, and I decided to go over and fetch some charged batteries from the bathroom.

And yes, as you’ve guessed by now, it worked.

It worked fine. It worked without exception. Every button, without delay.

Now, we’re not idiots. We did not just stick this remote control on top of the refrigerator because its batteries died. It definitely wasn’t working, at one point.

But the evidence surely speaks for itself that we called its time of death prematurely. And even with three years of dust and scum and hair, and with the same set of now-definitely-expired batteries potentially corroding a hole in its insides, the remote works better than ever. Who knows, maybe the dust and scum and hair helped.

I’m trying not to dwell on the stupidity of the whole thing.

Anyway, there was no way I was not going to take the remote for a spin immediately, having had to use imperfect workarounds for at least three years now. And it was probably that reason more than any other that I opted to watch Raising Arizona, my favorite movie of all time, on Saturday night, as mentioned in each of the past two posts.

There’s something so sweet and simple about being able to insert a DVD into your DVD player and not only know that it will work, but that you can pause it if you need to, without having to get up from the couch and press a button on the front. And there isn’t even a pause button on the front, so what you really had to do was stop it and then start it again. Fortunately, at least the player remembers where you left off. 

In fact, that DVD player has such a good memory that when I inserted the Agora DVD to play on Thursday, it remember that I’d borrowed this movie from the library on some previous occasion and watched about 30 seconds before deciding to save it for another time. It resumed from 30 seconds into the movie, like I’d just been watching it yesterday.

A good DVD player deserves a working remote control, does it not? 

About every four years, also

How often should a person watch his/her favorite movie of all time?

I guess my own answer to that is “about every four years.”

While writing about another every-four-year tradition this past weekend – watching a terrible movie on February 29^th – I noticed that there’s something else I’ve been doing every four years, namely, watching Raising Arizona.

Raising Arizona is my #1 movie on Flickchart, and has been for some time … well, at least four years, but I think more like six or even eight.

I watched it on Saturday night for a couple reasons:

1. When I was away the night before with a friend, he had a playlist going that had the song “Down in the Willow Garden” on it. If that title does not immediately ring a bell, it’s the lullaby Ed sings to Nathan Jr., with the lyrics “For I did murder that dear little girl/whose name was Rose Connelly.” Not only is the song used hauntingly there, but it returns in the score at the very end, and possibly one other time. Hearing the song was enough to get the juices flowing for another viewing.

2. When I decided not to try to watch another terrible movie on Saturday, having liked the terrible movie I watched that morning, I thought “If not the worst, why not watch the best?"

It wasn’t until later that I realized there was possibly something cosmic informing this decision, a natural return in a cycle of rewatches of my favorite movie.

When I added it to my rewatches list on Letterboxd, I noticed the last three dates I had seen Raising Arizona. I’ll include this rewatch in that date list as well, so it’s all the more obvious what kind of machine-like regularity I’m on with this film:

2/29/2020

3/13/2016

3/3/2012

6/2007

And before that, I did not keep track of rewatches. (And don’t have the specific date in 2007 because at that time, I only kept track of the month.)

The last three are remarkable in their consistency, all within a two-week period from the end of February, two of which were only four days apart. And exactly four years apart in each case. What are the odds of that, without being premeditated?

The psychology of late February/early March seems clear. At that point I’m still in the immediate afterglow of finalizing my year-end rankings, after which point I can return to the types of viewings I had been neglecting when I was cramming in movies from the previous year. Watching a favorite movie, just because you can, is a good way for a person to celebrate their new viewing freedom.

I don’t recall the circumstances of watching the movie in June of 2007, though I suppose it was another “it’s just time” viewing, and that perhaps it was about four years after the viewing before that.

Now, you might think that a person should watch their favorite movie more frequently than once every four years. Is it really your favorite movie if you watch it only as often as we elect a new president? There are movies I like less that I watch on average maybe every two years. (And it’s not lost on me that the viewings came during presidential election years, not to mention years of Summer Olympics, not to mention leap years, though I do think all those things are just coincidences.)

I’d argue “yes,” because a favorite movie should also be special. You don’t want to spoil it by watching it too much. It’s one of the reasons I pumped the brakes on my Tangled viewings as the last decade went along. I didn’t want to give Tangled the chance of being something my kids watched on repeat, creating the conditions where it could annoy me rather than charm me. (Alas, my kids don’t watch any movies on repeat anymore – it’s all YouTube, all the time.)

But you don’t want to let too much time elapse between viewings, because then you feel like your relationship with the movie is suffering. You want to maintain that relationship, your ability to quote it with ease, your memory of exact gestures and moments that vaulted it to #1 in the first place. Of which there are many in Raising Arizona. In fact, it’s a movie comprised of quotes, gestures and moments, perhaps more so that most.

I’m sure there’s been critical study of this idea, but it makes me wonder if there is something ideal about that four-year span that also helps determine how often we should elect presidents and how often we should watch Usain Bolt sprint. The leap day gives us an astronomical explanation, but is there something also in the human psyche that responds to four-year intervals? Or – to blow your mind even more – is whatever is in the human psyche that responds to four-year intervals also impacted by the cosmos?

Either way, I’m a Raising Arizona recidivist – “repeat offender.” I endure four-year sentences without it and then allow myself another little taste of the sublime.

It’s a system that works for me.

When February 29th viewings backfire

For the fourth time, I have chosen the arrival of another February 29th as the occasion to watch “the worst movie I can find.” The tradition started when I happened to watch the remake of The Wicker Man on February 29th of 2008, then decided to make a thing of it with Howard the Duck in 2012 and Manos: The Hands of Fate in 2016.

None of those films were disappointments in terms of the desired outcome. Each were awful in their own special way, offering howls of laughter and/or disbelief. Only Manos may actually be among the 20 worst films I’ve ever seen, but the candidacy of the others for an extremely rarely reoccurring series like this one was clear.

Well, in 2020, I’ve screwed it all up.

I didn’t have an obvious candidate leap (no pun intended) to mind this year, so I polled the good people at my Flickchart Facebook group. I had scanned the dregs of the global rankings on Flickchart for titles I hadn’t seen, and presented them with a list of choices, saying I would watch the one that got the most votes. They included such personal blind spots as Glitter, The Love Guru, Chairman of the Board, Alone in the Dark, Crossroads and Leonard Part 6. From Justin to Kelly was leading when I stopped counting the votes on the poll.

But I'd also given them the option to add a choice in the comments below, knowing of course that they'd have little idea what I had and had not already seen. This is how a groundswell of support for a different movie started. One commenter mentioned Christian Mingle, a 2014 film starring Lacey Chabert and directed by Corbin Bernsen, whose title I had heard come up in similar contexts in this group before.

Then the choice was seconded. Then the choice was thirded. And so on. I don't know if it actually ended up with more votes than From Justin to Kelly, but then again, a lot of people don't read the comments below, preferring to vote in the poll and be done with it. I decided that the crowd had spoken and had produced a choice for me that was historically bad, not just the kinds of generic misfires I had been providing them as options.

So I declared Christian Mingle the winner a month ago, the day after I posted the poll, and waited for February 29th to roll around.

I almost had to call an audible and go for From Justin to Kelly after all, as I couldn't find Christian Mingle to stream or purchase on any of the sites I regularly deal with. But lo and behold, there it was streaming on YouTube, in full, unexpurgated form -- "hidden" from those who might seek to take it down for copyright reasons, I suppose, only by having its title appear in Spanish.

Yesterday, I watched it.

And I liked the movie.

It's a risk you take any time you watch a "terrible" movie. I watched The Hottie and the Nottie for similar reasons eight or nine years ago, and I also liked The Hottie and the Nottie. Look, you can't hate every movie that most people hate, any more than you can love every movie most people love.

If you had asked me to guess why the good people at my Flickchart Facebook group had nominated Christian Mingle for my consideration -- because I did not specifically ask them -- I would have guessed the following two reasons:

1) It has a laughable execution, with terrible craft that includes, but might not be limited to, the acting, the editing, the camerawork, the song choices, and the presence of boom mics in the shots.

2) It is laughably tone deaf about how it communicates its obvious agenda of catering to a Christian audience, or possibly making believers out of those who are not.

Before I address those points individually, let me remind you of a core maxim I follow when it comes to film criticism. And that is, I meet every film on its own terms. If a movie is about ballerinas, I judge it as a movie about ballerinas. If a movie is about people who have sex with corpses, I judge it as a movie about people who have sex with corpses. I don't want to turn one into the other, and whether I am the intended audience for it or not, I need to judge it as though I were.

Christian movies are a prime example of this. If a movie is being made to speak to a Christian audience, I will try to put myself in the shoes of that audience. A movie being a Christian movie does not disqualify it from being a good movie. As one example, I am a big fan of the Kirk Cameron movie Fireproof, about a firefighter who learns to believe in God in a way that helps save his marriage. I just thought it totally worked.

Not to tarnish their good name, but I suspect the Flickcharters who nominated Christian Mingle have not seen any other Christian movies. I suspect the fact that they felt like they had walked into the wrong movie theater -- a phenomenon I am familiar with, believe me -- meant that they had a prejudice against the movie that they could never shake. Instead of giving the movie itself a fair shake, they instead sought to amass evidence that the movie was bad, rather than considering the idea that it might be good. It was guilty until proven innocent.

Of course, the reverse should also obviously be true -- just because you are trying to give a movie the benefit of the doubt does not mean it should blind you to the movie's faults. So let's consider those two categories I mentioned above.

1) Is the movie executed poorly?

No. The acting in it is fine to good. The filmmaking is workmanlike, perhaps, but never once distracts with an example of sub-par technique. The songs are Christian pop songs, but that's in keeping with an agenda that the film doesn't try to hide. It's a Christian movie, as the title quite obviously indicates, so why shouldn't it have songs about loving God? I would not expect otherwise.

I closely watched the structure of the story to see if it broke any basic rules, and there was only one I could find. The story is told from the perspective of Chabert's Gwyneth, and every moment on screen is something she could have witnessed or known about, with one exception. At one point the story feels like it's important for us to be privy to a phone conversation between the man she meets on the Christian Mingle dating website, Paul (Jonathan Patrick Moore), and his judgmental mother, played by Morgan Fairchild. This temporary and solitary break from Gwyneth's perspective should have been avoided, probably, but it's hardly reason to deduct any serious points from the movie. (As a side note, Fairchild was one of the first actresses I had the hots for when I began "noticing girls" back in the early 1980s, from seeing ads for her movie The Seduction on cable. As I was watching the movie, though, I was calling her Loni Anderson in my head, rather than remembering her actual name.)

As I read up a little on the film, I found that some people were offended by its presentation of the residents of a Mexican village -- there's a little bit of a white savior thing going on here, as there's a section featuring white Americans on a Christian mission to help restore a village that was damaged by a hurricane. But I didn't consider there to be anything egregious about this. I thought the film makes a pretty good effort to be racially inclusive, as when Gwyneth does start to find her way to God, it's through a church mostly comprised of black congregants.

So let's move on to ...

2) Is it Christian in a tone deaf way?

Here again the answer is no. A truly tone deaf movie about Christianity would make all the Christian characters unblemished heroes and all the non-Christians one-dimensional heathens. Really, though, there isn't a single unambiguously good Christian or unambiguously bad non-Christian.

So let's start with the Christians themselves. When we meet Paul, it's clear that the movie considers him a bit dorky. He's too buttoned up, he's a little awkward. When Gwyneth takes him to try sushi, he has a really hard time swallowing the bite and says he's more of a "cheese steak type of guy," or something along those lines. And I can tell from this scene that the movie is lightly critical of Paul for his closed-mindedness. This is definitely a movie that thinks sushi is good.

So then let's move to Paul's parents. His father (David Keith, looking quite larger and quite different from the last time I'd seen him) is a bit of a blowhard given to corny rhyming phrases -- his silly refrain regarding the Mexican village is "From door to door, we shall restore." At his urging, a number of parishioners go to lunch at a restaurant called Steak & Cake, where the only thing on the table is a plate of large steaks and several cakes on raised platters -- like, way more cake than the people present would need. There's no vegetables or anything. This movie is making fun of the excessive American myopia of a restaurant that serves only steak and cake, and pins that on these people who are supposed to be our "great Christian heroes."

And then let's look at Paul's mother. She is suspicious of Gwyneth from the start. (If I have not said it already, Gwyneth is a Christian in name only -- she can't remember the last time she went to church and does not know the Bible at all.) As it turns out her suspicions are warranted, but she comes across as a highly judgmental character who does not give Gwyneth really any chance at all before deciding she's hiding something. She's prissy and uptight and does not really strike one as a shining example of the type of Christianity you would expect a movie like this to be prizing.

Then there's Kel Kel (Jill Saunders), the girl Paul has known since childhood who is his obvious intended match. She represents exactly the type of Christianity Paul's mother prizes, and she wants Paul and Kelly to end up together. But it's quite obvious this movie knows Kel Kel is deficient as a character, a bit shallow and possibly even a bit backstabbing, even as she does things that have the appearance of being kind and generous. It's clear the movie doesn't think of her as a shining example of Christianity either.

Probably the closest example of the type of Christian the movie thinks is great is Gwyneth's "black friend," Pam, played by Saidah Arrika Ekulona. She works at the advertising agency with Gwyenth. And no, she doesn't always rise above the limitations of the "black friend" role, but this is hardly the only movie guilty of that. What she does do is present an alternative version of Christianity that is not in line with the religious right overtones of Paul's family. She's actually not a member of the predominantly black congregation Gwyneth joins, but rather, a "secret Christian" who only reveals her Christianity to Gwyneth when Gywneth is farther along on her journey. Gwyneth never suspected because Pam doesn't wear a crucifix necklace, to which Pam responds that that's really not her style.

The thing Christian Mingle gets right about Christianity is that there are "styles" of Christianity. You don't have to be white saviors charging into Mexico to help save a community devastated by a hurricane. You can be a non-crucifix wearing, by all accounts very hip black woman who works at an advertising agency. You can be another hip woman who works at an advertising agency who loves sushi and loves wearing spunky outfits. (Chabert's wardrobe is really great).

So let's look at the non-Christians to see how they fare.

Gwyneth has a greek chorus of secular friends who only pop up in a few scenes. They are basically supportive friends. They don't act snarky when she signs up for a Christian dating site, they just wonder if she will be revealed as not the same type of Christian that those people are looking for.

Then you've got her boss at the ad agency (Stephen Tobolowsky) and the agency's biggest client (John O'Hurley). Which, by the way, were two faces I loved seeing pop up in this movie. These characters have no idea about Gwyneth's dating life so they make no comment on her Christianity or lack thereof. They are just part of the work plot.

Still, a lesser movie would undercut these two characters who presumably have no faith. Tobolowsky, as her boss, would be particularly likely to be a dick. He's definitely eccentric -- he wears around a captain's hat as his agency is called Maritime Advertising -- and he gets (justifiably) annoyed at Gwyneth on a couple occasions when she's falling down in her duties. But ultimately, he is presented, in a way I thought of as quite clever, as a man who has his own kind of "faith." The movie makes the point that you have to have a little faith in the product you are shilling in order to properly shill it, and the product O'Hurley's character makes is a pill that's supposed to re-grow hair in bald people. Tobolowsky is such a person, and so that's the thing he has faith in -- and he expresses that faith in a really touching scene. In a way, this movie is supporting the idea of believing in something -- whether it's Christianity or regrowing your hair. I find it essentially optimistic in a way that's unafraid to be secular.

O'Hurley's character is basically just comic relief, as kind of a variation on J. Peterman, but he's harmless.

I know I've spent a lot of time on how the film conveys its Christianity, so let's just summarize by saying that it doesn't lay it on nearly as thick as you would expect. Really clueless Christian movies start with the Gods and Jesuses right from the start, and this one really doesn't. Even though Bernsen and Chabert are both Christians who speak openly about their faith, they are shrewd enough to know what turns people off. Then again, even Kirk Cameron can do this subtly when he wants to.

Obviously I experienced this movie very differently from most people. On Letterboxd, here's what the spread of its user star ratings looks like:

That's 557 half-star ratings compared to the 39 who gave it three stars, one of whom is me.

Again not to denigrate my fellow Flickcharters or anyone else who hates this movie, but I do wonder if hating Christian Mingle feels like some people's duty in the current culture wars. Like, if you say you like Christian Mingle, you are somehow helping Donald Trump get reelected. I understand that impulse, though I can't endorse it. Christian Mingle is more nuanced than that, I think.

I think it can feel scary to say you like a movie like Christian Mingle -- I feel scared just writing this post. Scared for a number of reasons. For one, that you'll think I have no ability to discern good from bad, and will never trust my critical opinions again. But also, scared that you will think I'm a "crazy Christian," or that I may be starting my own "path to Jesus."

But just how I hope most people are getting over being afraid to make a comment where someone might "think they're gay," I don't think I or anyone else should be afraid to say that a Christian movie is good without someone "thinking I'm Christian." Being able to appreciate something intended for a certain type of person does not mean you are that type of person, but then again, so what if you are?

I watched Christian Mingle on the morning of February 29th when I was away for the night with a friend, and he was still asleep. (I'm not gay! Ha ha.) I did give temporary consideration as to whether I should try to "salvage" my February 29th terrible movie by watching another candidate -- say, From Justin to Kelly -- when I got home later on.

I ultimately decided against it. (In fact, I re-watched my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona.) I ultimately decided that I'd made a good faith (ha ha) effort to watch something truly terrible, where all existing evidence stated it was terrible. Just because it had not, in the end, been terrible for me, does not make it a failure for this February 29th "series."

It just serves as a reminder that movies can always surprise us, that our preconceived notions are often wrong, and that maybe we shouldn't even have those preconceived notions.

Being surprised is the reason we watch movies.

Amen to that.